Now that we’re past the DragonFly 4.8 release, Francois Tigeot has added an update to the i915 driver, bringing it to match what’s in the Linux 4.7.10 kernel. He also committed Peeter Must’s port of the vga_switcheroo module.
This week’s BSDNow has no interview, but covers most every BSD to some extent, and talks about something I find super-interesting: a BSD phone.
KnoxBUG is meeting tonight – there’s no speaker scheduled, so it will be open discussion.
DragonFly 4.8 is officially released! Download from your nearest mirror, where it should appear in the next 24 hours. If you’re upgrading your existing install, you can use the generic instructions in the release notes or in my users@ email; whichever you click first. Don’t forget to ‘pkg upgrade’!
Old-school UNIX and games this week.
- Managing an open source project. (via)
- There was a Coke machine connected to the ARPANET in the 70’s. The local version of this has a Beastie on the front. (via)
- Swan – GNU/Cygwin Xfce Desktop. At first glance, “XFCE for Windows” is a much more clear title. Plus the inevitable bash shell, which seems to be a good enough simulation of Unix for most people. (via)
- Making Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup with 253 cooks and no head chef.
- OCR typography, a more extensive subject than I expected.
- Sunsetting SixXS. Time for service providers to put up.
- No, I Don’t Want to Subscribe to Your Newsletter. I hate modal popups. (via)
- Xfce bug: “default desktop screen causes damage to monitor” Cat problem, and not the one in /bin. (via)
- Chasing the First Arcade Easter Egg. (via)
- A Second Life for very old C programs. (via)
More thinking topics than version changes this week, which is interesting.
- Comprehensive and biased comparison of OpenBSD and FreeBSD. It’s the PDF transcript from the FOSDEM 2017 “My BSD sucks less than yours” presentation, linked previously. (via)
- OPNsense 17.1.3 released.
- Ask HN: Why is BSD becoming more popular in embedded devices? Lots of half-informed theorizing there.
- The BSD family tree. Not new, but the discussion at the source link is more to look at, along with other links.
- Upgrading notes for pfSense 2.3.x users, where 2.3.x < 2.3.3.
- tech@openbsd.org: regarding OpenSSL Licence change. Nothing goes well with OpenSSL. Hey, it rhymes! (via)
- golang now has native support for OpenBSD’s pledge(2).
- “And then the murders began.” – applied to tech BSD books.
- TrueNAS and ZFS terms and explanations.
An article about a semctl(2) bug on DragonFly, “Make DragonFlyBSD great again!“, has popped up a few times, in comments here, some online forums, and in IRC. I’m linking to it so that I can also say: read all the way to the end and notice the date. The bug was fixed more than 6 months ago. This is not a current security problem, but a (enjoyable) description of how someone in Poland documented it.
Nobody reads anything but headlines, geez.
BSDNow 186 gets back into the convention grind after last week’s news about new roles: coverage of the recent AsiaBSDCon, and an interview of Philipp Buehler.
The last time SSH was updated in DragonFly, a DragonFly-specific customization, “PasswordAuthentication No”, was reverted to the default. This meant password logins through SSH worked on DragonFly – which is normal for perhaps every other UNIX-ish operating system, but DragonFly has traditionally defaulted to requiring a key out-of-the-box.
It has been fixed, and you can change the setting back. This only affected DragonFly-master from August through March. 4.6 users are unaffected.
Michael W. Lucas will be presenting at SemiBUG tomorrow, talking about the OpenBSD web stack.
Technical details week for Lazy Reading.
- Dwarf Fortress creator Tarn Adams talks about simulating the most complex magic system ever. (via)
- mdp – A command-line based markdown presentation tool.
"ffscreencastis a shell wrapper forffmpegthat allows fool-proof screen recording via the command line.” (via)- 802.eleventy what? A deep dive into why Wi-Fi kind of sucks.
- What it feels like to be an open-source maintainer. (via)
- CIA’s vim user tips published by WikiLeaks. (via)
- How Unexplored generates great roguelike dungeons.
- Today in OBEY.
- Windowmaker 0.95.8 released. I still like it after all this time. (via)
- A game where Character Creation is the Whole Game.
- Build your first PC in PC Building Simulator’s demo. Bizarre, but somehow makes sense.
- Names that Make Computers Go Crazy. (via)
- Discussion of analog timing sources on NANOG. Interesting precisely because it’s not Internet-visible, not directly.
Your unrelated tea link of the week: Haha, one of the world’s best tea houses is in my town. It’s Leaf Tea Bar, and Niraj is one of the nicest guys. His prices are reasonable for the quality of the tea, too.
Your related bug link of the week: Teeth of the DragonFly. (via)
Much better than last week, but there wasn’t any hurricane-force winds this week – which helps.
- Complexity and Strategy. Talks about Microsoft products, but think about this in terms of any long-lived operating system code base – e.g. any BSD, or specifically OpenBSD given their correctness goals. (via)
- Freenas 10 (now called Freenas Corral) released – the press release.
- pfSense OpenVPN unattended deploy options?
- Intel’s ACPICA is now available under a BSD license. Doing the right thing.
- New mandoc -mdoc -T markdown converter
- time scrolling. Remapping keyboard/mouse events in X.
- /usr/bin/time: not the command you think you know. Linked here because the example is from a BSD environment. (via)
- NetBSD 7.1 released.
- iXsystems Attends AsiaBSDCon 2017.
- “What exactly is BSD?“
- openbsd changes of note 6, openbsd changes of note 7
- EuroBSDCon 2017 Call for Proposals is out.
- vBSDCon 2017 Call for Proposals is out.
- Relayd and the Next Tech Book. Related to the next link,
- Get your name in “Absolute FreeBSD 3rd Edition”
BSDNow 185 has existing host Kris Moore performing his last episode (because $dayjob) and Benedict Reuschling coming in to replace him. Allan Jude is unchanged, of course. As they correctly point out, 185 weeks of on-time video content is a tremendous achievement so far. This week’s episode is 55 minutes of talking with the old and the new staff.
Sepherosa Ziehau went to AsiaBSDCon 2017 and gave a talk on his work with DragonFly’s networking. He’s published a report of his trip, which comes with a link to his paper, his presentation, and pictures of who he met.
Note that the PDF and the Powerpoint slides links are different; one is the paper, one is the talk. The Powerpoint slides contain the benchmarks linked here in comments, previously.
Matthew Dillon picked up a number of different NVMe SSD drives, and tested them. He wrote up the entire test, but the immediate summary is: buy Samsung.
I always attributed speed issues to writing transaction history, but: Matthew Dillon discovered HAMMER was repeating itself when writing to disk. Fixing that issue doubled write speed. This fix is in 4.6 and the upcoming release.
I tagged the release candidate for DragonFly 4.8 – slightly delayed because of my involuntary time offline – and here’s the resulting automatic changelist. There’s ISO/IMG files uploaded now to the main DragonFly archive, which means they should be available at a mirror near you soon.
I had overflow from last week, so I have a good list for you, despite being offline for days.
- Your Code is Junky. I haven’t thought about FrontPage in years, and that’s on purpose. It was a trainwreck.
- Raiders of the Lost OS: Reclaiming a piece of Polish IT history. I have never heard of CROOK. (via)
- meaningful short names.
- missing features as features
- The Collapse of the UNIX Philosophy. Drinking game: drink every time the author or commenters at the source link conflate bash and UNIX, or Linux and UNIX, or assume a quirk solved in 1985 is a relevant worry today, etc. You’ll be drunk very soon.
- Adobe Illustrator is 30 years old. Linking mostly for the side-by-side image of the tool palettes over the years.
- USG is a firewall for your USB ports. firmware firewall – you can still have malicious software in the data portion of the USB drive. (via)
- Two frequently used system calls are ~77% slower on AWS EC2. gettimeofday() – about as simple as it gets, and used constantly. (via)
- selfie – compiler, emulator, and hypervisor (C and MIPS) all bundled together. (via)
- Computers and art meet face-to-face.
- (related comics link)
Your unrelated tea link of the day: defining what it means when you read “mug of tea” vs “cup of tea”. You’d think it was interchangeable, but the meanings diverge. (PDF, via)
Way short this week because we had high winds in my area, knocking out power for most people. I didn’t lose power, but I lost my data link.